My ache to be mirrored...It's all coming back.

Everybody has the ability do anything they want. In fact, I always felt, if i put my heart into anything I do, I fare well. Whatever I do or have done, can be done by any one and much beyond too. The reason I am what I am now, is not because of any body else, but because of my own self. As they say, I got in my own way. These are the 10 commandments of my life now, and which I want to change for good.

Myself- 2008	Myself- 2010
1. Very procrastinating	1. Very very procrastinating
2. Taking minimal things personally	2. Taking things way too personally
3. Trying to change others (as if I am perfect! )	3. Trying to change others (thinking I am perfect!)
4. Never letting fear run my Life	4. Letting fear run the major part of my Life
5. Never was envious of others	5. Being envious sometimes
6. Giving advice when they want something else	6. Giving advice when they want something else and if possible rub it in by pointing out their mistakes
7. Saying yes when I want to say No	7. Saying a BIG Yes when I want to say No
8. Getting so angry that I make things worse	8. Getting very angry that I make things irreversible
9. Never playing it safe, always take risks	9. What is safety? Life is full of risks!
10. Trying to take care of everybody	10. Trying to take care of everybody and do more

1. There is always a confusion between urgency and priority. Procrastination is something that we all deal with, in our lives. I have always procrastinated. If you ask me why I procrastinate? I can come up with few answers (Oh yes, I can always justify my stand with the given assumptions I have about that subject, and you bet I do it often.) I tend to attend to "comfort" tasks which are most convenient, interesting, or within reach. Priority is sacrificed for convenience. For instance, writing this blog post, when I am supposed to be writing a paper.
2. Well, we all take many things personally. As the sentence suggests "personally" is purely subjective and "personal". Just think of incidents where you felt you were emotionally punched. These incidents have nothing to do with actual facts. They’re all about your translations and how you perceived it. You feel you don't get credit for what you do. Not all you do will be liked by everyone. Just go by this.... swswswsw ( “Some will. Some won’t. So what? Someone’s waiting!”) and of course not every one is as jobless as you.
3 & 6. Ha.. This one's my favorite. I will tell you why. I presume we all, including the person who is reading this, feel that our sense of right and wrong, is right and wrong. We think we know the best and the worst of life and can improve others life with our advices. But in reality, its not so. Simply because, we all face different situations and different people. So still, why do we try to change others? Hmmm, one intuitive reason could be because we want them that way. Then that's being selfish. And also there is this self-justifying factor, "I-dont-try-to-change-people's mind. I just give them my point of view on the subject , and they can choose whether to accept it or not". I have been trying to accept people as they are, but I should say I haven't fulfilled that to the extent I want to.
4. Fear is what that puts me in the backseat even now. If you ask me fear of what?, I have no answer.
5. Envy.. Well, as long as it is healthy and does not affect me, I don't mind envying others. I try to emulate them and it is good in a way.
7. This has been my second most biggest problem. I cant say no for shit. Only because, I do not want to hear no from others, and I feel empathetic when people ask me something. But I should seriously start changing this habit of mine.
8. Anger.Many have spoken about this in the past. I need not add any more to it. The word summarizes what I want to say.
9. This one is actually under my control now. I can stop it if I want to. One of the few things I can say with confidence that I can do. But however there are people who still believe I cant. You have two sides to a coin.
10. This is by far my biggest problem. I think I am here to take care of others whoever needs me. However, I am not. I need to take care of myself first. And by that, I do not mean I should be selfish and take care of my own stuff. I need to have a superposition of my priorities and my crave to help others in need. I feel that after listening and caring about the needs of others, I need a break from all this. But what works even better is to have the world reciprocate by listening and caring about me in the same way. Mirror Neurons are special nerve cells in our cerebral cortex that fire when we watch another person do something, imagine ourselves doing the same thing or when we actually do the same thing. They are what are behind the phenomenon of yawning when others yawn. They are also thought to be behind imitation, learning and empathy. My observation which is borne out by my socializing practice with this murky world is that each time I conform psychologically and emotionally to others needs, (haha :P) I get a reciprocal hunger to have it be returned . That is my ache to be mirrored.

Ps:- This little retrospect of myself was to give myself a dose of what and how I behave with the society. This was in pure intention to criticize my own self and not to hurt anybody else who might relate to this in any form or manner.
PPs:- There is a Ted Talk by famous neuro-scientist, V S Ramachandran on mirror neurons. Pretty awesome!

Taxanomy of alto relievo

The other day I was thinking about justice, and was trying to understand the meaning of justice, a heinous task that i have forced myself to engage for quite some time now. Why is something just to me, unjust to someone else. The conceptions of justice varies with people in the same efficacious sense as with me. I do not have a tad of doubt in doing things that I presume is just to me. So how did this notion of right/wrong come into me?
To start with, I was wondering where to start? How did I start learning things? How did I learn to differentiate just and unjust (to me)? How do I form opinions about any topic in this life ? Why should I have opinions about anything and everything in this life?
A simple answer would be because I am a human and "I think". For any educated and trained mind A is A. We all think of our thoughts and notions as sui generis and truly unique. But little we realize the difference between objective truth and subjective truth. Perhaps a difficult philosophical question would be to ask yourself, "Am I a rationalist?". I am sure most of us, who claim ourselves to be radical would have asked that question and would have come to a conclusion that "Yes I am one, and a pretty good one at that.." with aplomb. But sadly, that is not the truth, or to be specific, that is not the objective truth. Its simply because, while asserting that question, you make a dubious assumption that "my set of axioms/assumptions (need to) concern only me". A rationalist is a generic term and for all of us to fall into that category we must have had same set of assumptions. And yet, it is as clear as water, that there are different rationalists in their own way.
Simply put, we all start with a null set "U", then as years go by we all have our own taste of life, we start adding elements to that set, based on experience, observations, reasoning which form the objective subset of "U". There is also a subjective subset associated with this set, which comes from the feelings, emotions and reactions to any given situation. Rationality in the sense of subjectivity is driven by the motive of acheiving your goals in an optimal manner. i.e what is good to you, is good to you alone and need not be good to others. Whereas objective truth is something that's always "1" even if you bring in human feelings and emotions. I have tried to be objective in my thinking from the moment I learned the meaning of the word objectivity.
Justice, objectivity, subjectivity, rationalism..... How are these things interconnected? What do you think is rational justice?
I have had this take on rationalism all the while but never got an opportunity to realise what i felt about it until yesterday. It was a normal sunday afternoon siesta. I just got up from my sleep and came out of my bed to the hall, where I saw deepak (my room mate) with a friend of his, Chao Ying, a girl from china and Raj, Nanyang Heights room mate . One of the advantages of studying in an international university is the acquaintance of different people, and cultures from all over the world. After getting introduced, we all sat down over a cup of tea and started picking out topics from air to have a light-hearted banter.
Ying said, " Raj sits next to Fahd (who is from Pakistan) and I just went and put an imaginary line between them, stating this is the border between and India and Pakistan :D "
I said, " Yeah, and China has to make that decision :P "
We all laughed over it. It was just a topic of discussion for us, over a coffee. But there is more meaning to that than this.
"We are told in our schools that we are always right on the face of war, it's "they" who caused problems first", said Chao Ying.
"That is so damn true", I said.
This is the idea of rational justice that is being propagated through out this world. Its all relative (even in thinking), Einstein was right about relativity theory (laughs). If I rack my brains to find one such situation where India or any country for that matter, have accepted their mistake, unless its so obvious, during the face of war, then probably the world would have been a better place to live in. We were taught about how bad the communal riots were, and so Mahatma Gandhi had to separate Hindustan into India and Pakistan. If one thing that i have learned from my social text books, they are that the historians lie, your parents lie, everybody lies, but they all cover it up saying its for a specific greater good." Greater good", is the good of their kin and friends. Good, here is with no doubt the subjective good, where in, its good for few sect of people, and bad for others.
The division of humans based on ideologies and notions is far more a menacing problem than the division based on religions. This is because, these trained minds, with different ideologies were the pioneers in finding different religions/sects/caste. The other few trained rationalists who call themselves the heads of the society used it for their advantage, and its the common man who is facing the repercussions of such a brutal division. Religion, which is considered a primary cause for many man-made calamaties of the nature, follows a set of rules, which changes as and when the ruler changes. There are also people who do not believe in religion and yet beign rationalists are cause of such dreadful events. Its because of the fact that, they close their minds to all those other sets that describe the reasons of actions. One of the evasive replies I get from my friends who like to believe in religion and god is, we are better off following a doctrine of principles, where in the real truth is hidden, and its hard to think of the consequences of public knowing the real truth, for which case the apparent truth is seen as a solution, which gives them the desired mental peace. The other non-god followers, do not want to open up to new "sets" of thinking , simply because they do not seem to see the picture from their systematic gathering of observations. Reason is universal to those people. The rules of my definition of being radical are purely objective and algebraic. 1+4 = 5 always, no matter what. That is objective truth.
We are all living in the illusion of this deliberative rationality, where in we assume we are rational in our thoughts, and justice is universal. But the bare naked truth is we are not considering the totality of all sets that ascertain our system of reasoning. Will opening up your minds to all probabilities and possibilities be a solution? No not yet, there again comes the problem of your definition of "all the sets and assumptions".
Thus, I have shared my purely objective (" you can choose to differ") thought about rationalism and justice that seems to be a pivotal problem in this world along with the minacious problems such as religion, terrorism and God. (No offense to anybody for including God here, because I feel, that is, one of the problems that is affecting human kind in a bigger way than any of us can imagine). Rational Justice is not universal. We all Lie. We should question the existence of every possible and impossible idea, and from there starts the process of learning. These are the hidden truths, that I see in the alto relievo of the sculpture life, and you too have one. We form a taxanomical classification.

Reached Or Left?

I am back at home now. I guess, by now, everybody (from NITC) will be under their home ceiling. Just sitting on my couch and thinking about all these 4 years creates a medley of emotions in me. It brings about that part in me who is very consciously trying to fight the repercussions of separation. The feeling of getting separated from the ones you love and have lived with leaves a big void in your life, which will take time filling. The moment I left the college I knew it was going to be difficult, nevertheless inevitable. I was wondering why this feeling of total separation doesn’t come if we are getting separated from our parents or relatives? Why alone that friendship be given this treatment? Why can’t we take it as the way it is when we separate our relatives? That is, having a hope that we are going to reunite no matter what. I was trying to be foolishly practical when it came to bidding farewell to my near and dear ones at the college. I kept on reassuring myself that no matter what I am not going to lose touch with these friends of mine. But then another part of me asked, “This is what you told me when you left 10^th and 12^th?, how can you be so sure that you will be in touch with all of them no matter what?”. I just thought for a second and asked one of my other parts, have I been true to my conscience? Have I kept the similar promise I made during my 10^th and 12^th? I got a very prompt answer- NO! I am neither in touch with many of my old friends nor do I feel guilty or sad about it. Of course I am not speaking about my immediate circle of friends I had in my past, I do feel guilty that I cannot keep in touch with them. I am talking about those friends whom I did not spend much time with but still had a significant role in my life back then. Anyway no matter how much I reassure myself it’s a bare naked truth that i can’t keep in touch with everybody. I can only think of being in touch with the close ones who were there through thick and thin. But that also looks bleak, considering the fact that I might end up any where in the globe 5 years from now. It’s very human to adapt to situations. No matter how big a loss, our human brain is programmed to adapt to changes, simply people change. The things that matter to us now will be just a long forgotten dream later. I am desperately fighting against developing that feeling when it comes to my friends at NITC. I want to do my best to remember them and cherish the memories we had. I have started to accept that if I have a feeling I necessarily do not need to act on it. I have a feeling of separation now, if I start telling myself that this is it, it is going to be difficult to meet again, even if we meet again after a long time that bonding won’t be there and our love will diminish, I am doing great injustice to my friends and their feelings. So I decided to be brave and face it. When the Tata Sumo came to pick me up and I had all my friends, (barring a few) who mattered beside me, warrier vvs, britto, joseph, bijoy, sridhar, nithin and hari.I did not want to cry. I did not cry too. I felt depressed at leaving them, but hoping that we will meet soon again ( I am planning to go to ernakulum and meet them on may 15th I really cant wait for that day now). I was going to the city in the car, me lakshmi, hari and nithin were supposed to meet up for probably the last lunch we could have together at mezban calicut. They both were coming in a different car while me and nithin in one car. These people are one of the closest friends I have in my college. On the way to mezban I was profusely apologizing for the mistakes I did to all. We finally ended up in mezban. An air of silence seemed to fill us and we were not speaking to each other the way we used to. For some reason me and nithin did not feel it and were being normal while the other two were showing mixed emotions. I did not want this feeling to encompass me. I did not want to perish under this. I was determined not to show a teary face. I somehow managed for quite a while, actually I knew that there is no point in crying but whenever lakshmi cried, hari used to let her cry. Somehow I couldn’t see the two persons I love the most, my best friends and my best critics, crying. I kept on reassuring myself that time is a better healer (although I never believed that, I believe doing certain things is a better healer). At the entrance of the hotel when we were about to part I couldn’t stand it. I had to leave now. I bid farewell to both and went into the car. The car left and as I saw their faces zooming out I looked at myself into the mirror and saw a small tear rolling out. Then everything came as a flash, all my friends faces when I left the hostel, my NITC campus and every single thing associated with it. I was resisting myself from crying because I hate crying. I hate myself weeping over the inevitable. It was one of those times where your heart rules over your mind. And now I am here on my couch with laptop on my lap, not knowing how to express my feelings to all those I loved. I don’t know if I have left my home or just reached it!